Why Aren’t We Having More Babies?

DUBNER: So, you got your Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. I know that you and your husband have eight children, and you are stepmom to six more children from your husband’s first marriage. I’m guessing there are not many other Harvard-educated economists who have 14 children? 

Catherine PAKALUK: I don’t know of any. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. But I don’t know of any. 

Catherine Pakaluk is an economics professor at The Catholic University of America. I asked about her main areas of research.

PAKALUK: Education, schools, fertility, family formation. 

DUBNER: And what would you say you bring to those topics that the median economist might not bring?

PAKALUK: I think I bring to the table a large number of things that are outside of the field. And, you know, of course I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t add that, well, I have a lot of kids. And so that makes you think about things a little bit differently.

You might say that a lot of people have started to think differently about fertility and family formation. For decades, the great fear among demographers and politicians and environmentalists was overpopulation. They argued that the Earth’s resources simply couldn’t support three billion people — certainly not five billion, or eight billion — which is where we stand today. That fear hasn’t totally gone away, but it has been joined by a fear of the opposite: that there are now too few babies being born. Here’s an astonishing fact: the global fertility rate has fallen by more than half over the past 50 years. Why? The answer to that question is complicated — and any “solution” is even more so. Today on Freakonomics Radio: we begin a three-part series about the great arc of human life. The inspiration for this series was a famous painting by Gustav Klimt called “Death and Life.” It shows a healthy newborn lying serenely on a bed of flowers among a group of adults, most of them young women; but there, off to the side, is Death — a Grim Reaper, smiling over this peaceful scene, knowing that he will win out in the end. That’s the thing: life is finite; and life is precious; does our knowing that it’s finite make it even more precious? That’s a deep question, one we probably won’t be able to answer during this series. But it will surely be hovering over every minute. Our three-part series, “Cradle to Grave,” starts now.

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Donald Trump has declared himself “the fertilization president,” and he wants Americans to have more babies. Why? Let’s start with what’s called the total fertility rate — that’s “the expected number of births that a woman would have over her lifetime.” In the first half of the 19th century, the U.S. fertility rate was over six babies per woman; in the late 1950s, it was 3.7^; today, it’s at 1.6 babies per woman, a record low. That also puts us well below the so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1 — that’s the number needed to keep a population steady. So the Trump Administration has proposed a variety of policies: a $5,000 baby bonus; federally-funded fertility-education programs; even a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women who have six or more children. Catherine Pakaluk would certainly be eligible for that medal. She had six of her eight biological children while she was in graduate school; the oldest is now 25. She has found that people make assumptions about women with a lot of children.

PAKALUK: The first assumption, which is pretty common, is that it’s somehow a less-than-rational choice. That you do this maybe for cult-like reasons, because somebody says that you should, or a religious leader says that you should. Especially as somebody whose professional life is devoted to introspection and clear thinking and understanding, especially as an economist, the nature of rationality, that feels really painful. You fear that it may look to your colleagues as if the choice to have children is in some way revealing a lack of seriousness about your work. I want to be very clear, most of what I’m telling you is in my head. I’m not accusing anybody of having been less than supportive, or negative, in any way. But the concern is you think that your colleagues will think you’re not as capable.

DUBNER: We should say there are plenty of male economists who do manage to have a good number of children while they’re building their careers. 

PAKALUK: Yeah. If you’re raising the question of the difference between men and women having children in academia, we know that getting married and having children — there isn’t a productivity penalty, and in fact, maybe a little gain. But for women, of course, time is a rival good, right? When people say children are expensive, they’re not wrong, but they aren’t used to using the language economists use. They’re expensive in terms of opportunity cost or lifestyle cost. If the only fun thing you could do 40 years ago on your weekends, with the amount of income you had relative to the purchasing power that you had, if the only fun thing you could do is stay home and watch TV and drink beer — well, maybe having a kid is not really a big problem for you. But if the thing you can do now is you could travel, for instance — way more accessible for so many more people all around the world — well, that next kid is going to completely change. That’s a real cost. 

Forty years ago, fewer than three percent of U.S. citizens even owned a passport. Today, it’s around 50 percent. So, yes, a lot of things have changed, a lot of opportunities have arisen. As she was thinking about big-picture fertility, Pakaluk realized it would be useful to consider not just those smaller families, but also outliers like herself, people who are still having a lot of kids.

PAKALUK: Do they believe different things? Have they made different choices? Do they have a different value structure? What does that look like? So, I began traveling around the country to speak with women in a variety of communities who have larger-than-normal-sized families to find out why they’re doing this, and what they think it means for themselves and for their families. 

Pakaluk and her research team interviewed 55 women across the country, all of whom have five or more children. The research project became a book that Pakaluk published in 2024, called Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.

PAKALUK: The biblical Hannah is probably the single-most known character in the world who represents someone who really wanted a child.

DUBNER: Your book is a qualitative study, but it’s not a quantitative study. Plainly if we’re talking about big population statistical analysis, this is just a drop in the bucket. Why did you go that route? 

PAKALUK: We really do have a lot of great, large population data about what’s happening with birth rates in general. What we’re missing are some of the nitty-gritty about the theory. So that’s where you turn, in social sciences, to qualitative work, when you’re trying to struggle with the theory. 

All the women she interviewed have college degrees, and all are religious.

PAKALUK: They don’t see wanting children as a choice of a plan or control in the way that I think most people think about planning their families. There’s a very specific content to wanting children, which has to do with cooperation with God’s providence. I think people who think you can’t have too many children are particularly interesting. Children are this sort of substantive good, but they probably don’t obey the same laws of economic preferences, where most normal goods you eventually get satisfied by them, or we say diminishing returns.

DUBNER: One thing this makes me think of is really, I think an often unobserved or maybe even unobservable idea, which is, what is the utility to the children who were born in a big family who wouldn’t have been born if it was a smaller or average-sized family? And in this regard, I point to myself. I’m the youngest of eight. I believe you were one of nine siblings, is that right?

PAKALUK: Yes, I’m the oldest of nine. So, I would have made it. I would have made it. 

DUBNER: You would have made it, but I keep thinking that —

PAKALUK: But you would not have made it. 

DUBNER: Yeah, if my family hadn’t decided for some rather strange set of reasons to have eight children, I wouldn’t be around to complain about, you know, anything, much less opine on proper family size.

PAKALUK: When I was having my children, it gave me some special pleasure to think about — you know, having my fifth, I would think, Okay, which of my siblings is my fifth? And that’s my brother Ed. He’s such a good friend of mine and Ed’s great. So then when you think like, Are we done trying to have children? And you think to yourself, Well maybe there would be a little bit of a loss in thinking there isn’t going to be that last child. 

DUBNER: One memory I have of the biblical Hannah is that — you know, this is back when prayer was not common, or normalized, in the Jewish tradition, but that Hannah did pray very, very intensely to God to be able to have a child, which she hadn’t been able to. And that her prayer was so intense, that people thought she was crazy. And that strikes me as a perhaps unintentionally appropriate parallel between the biblical Hannah and modern Hannahs, who are considered like, I mean, I didn’t plan to ask you this question this directly, because it sounds quite rude, but have people from your friend groups, professional groups, your own extended family, etc., thought that you were a little bit crazy for wanting so badly to have so many children? 

PAKALUK: Yeah, people just don’t know what to make of it. The most polite version is something, like, “Why?” You know, “Why would you do this?” Sometimes there’s less polite versions of it.

DUBNER: For instance?

PAKALUK: “Don’t you know how this happens?” Right? People say these things when they see a group of little kids, and they think, Oh, no, they’re not all yours. Most of us who get asked these questions, you come up with something kind of funny. But in fact there’s not an easy way to answer, “Why would you do this?” 

DUBNER: But you feel this is your servitude, essentially, yes? Would you say to a stranger, “I believe that God wants me to have a lot of children”? 

PAKALUK: I might say it. It would depend on the context of the conversation. I might revert to, “I think it’s great. It’s a substantive good. Having children is wonderful.” I sometimes say, “I enjoyed my first one so much I wanted another one, and kept going.”

DUBNER: Is it fair to call you an advocate of or a promoter of higher fertility in general? 

PAKALUK: I’m only an advocate insofar as I’m happy to talk about my own personal experience. But I’m a really strong believer that the household is the correct locus of decision-making, and that only an individual household can correctly assess the costs and benefits to them. I also think it’s the only locus that is workable in a non-tyrannical society, or a free society, we’ll say.

When Catherine Pakaluk says that “only an individual household can assess the costs and benefits” of having children — I’m guessing most of us can appreciate that sentiment. But I’m guessing we also appreciate that a steep drop in fertility across a society does have consequences. Matthias Doepke certainly does.

Matthias DOEPKE: How many children we have, and what we do with our families are in many ways the most important decisions in our life, both at a personal level but also for the economy. 

Doepke is a German-born economist who teaches at the London School of Economics.

DOEPKE: I’m trained originally as a macroeconomist, but in fact most of my work touches on family economics. 

He also co-wrote a book called Love, Money, and Parenting: How Economics Explains the Way We Raise Our Kids. And he has three children, if you’re wondering.

Economists like Doepke and Pakaluk didn’t used to do research on things like family formation. But that changed with Gary Becker. He was a more holistic thinker than most economists of his era — Becker got his Ph.D. in 1955, won a Nobel prize in 1992, and died in 2014 — and he liked to blend in ideas from sociology and criminology. When Matthias Doepke got his Ph.D., at the University of Chicago, he studied under Gary Becker.

DOEPKE: For Gary Becker, economics is just a way to think about how people make decisions. And you can apply that method to everything. Who you marry, how many children you have, how you educate your children — all of those are decisions that can be analyzed with the tools of economics. 

DUBNER: Why, as an economist, is fertility and family formation such an important topic? 

DOEPKE: If you think, for example, of economic growth, it depends on population growth. How many people there are, of course, is relevant for economic prospects. If an economy is shrinking in population, it will also shrink in economic output. There’s also important decisions on education — on human capital more widely — that are done inside families, which matter a lot for how the economy does in the long-term. 

DUBNER: Economists have many phrases to describe many things that normal people don’t need. You have a lot of jargon. When I hear you talk about children, my mind goes to some of the categorizations that economists use to describe things, like normal goods, inferior goods, and luxury goods. Where do children fall in there?

DOEPKE: That was the first fundamental question in the economics of fertility. Because the first observation in the data that Gary Becker had to deal with, when he started with this whole enterprise, was that it used to be the case that richer people have fewer children. So, there was large families among the poorer households, smaller families among the richer households. And that was true everywhere, across countries. Also over time, as countries get richer, they have fewer children. If you just think of children as consumption goods — which maybe you shouldn’t, — but if you wanted to do that, you would have to say, “That sounds like children are an inferior good.” It’s an example of the kind of goods that you want less of as you get richer. With children, it’s not quite like that. When you get richer, instead of having a child, you have a very fancy dog or something like that. It’s not the mechanism that’s going on, so something else has to be going on. Gary Becker tried to explain this pattern, even though rich people otherwise have more of everything. And his idea was that having children involves both deciding how many to have and how much to invest in them, something that he refers to as child quality. 

Okay, if you were starting to worry that Gary Becker wasn’t quite a real economist, you can stop worrying, now that we’re talking about “child quality” and how much to invest in children. And there’s plenty of evidence that Becker’s framework was correct: high-income countries like Japan and South Korea and Spain have fertility rates well below the replacement level. What has changed since Becker’s time is that many countries that are not wealthy, like Albania and Nepal and El Salvador, are also below the replacement level.

DOEPKE: What was initially something done only by higher-income parents is now done by almost everybody. And so while the quantity/quality choice is still there, it’s perhaps not what’s driving most of the variation that we are seeing today. 

Okay, so what has been driving lower fertility rates? One obvious answer — obvious at least to an economist — is the fact that millions upon millions of women have been entering the workforce.

DOEPKE: We had a model of a clear gender separation of labor a generation ago, where many women were homemakers or would interrupt their careers for long periods. We are in a different phase now, where younger women and men have very similar aspirations. Most mothers are working, fathers are working. And that creates a tension that we haven’t fully resolved yet. It’s difficult to have two jobs and three or four children. So many people stop a bit earlier. The other thing that has happened is, how we raise our children has changed. The nature of parenting is now quite different. We see in all the high-income countries that parents spend a lot more time on parenting than they did a generation ago. The effort required has gone up, to some extent for cultural reasons but mostly, I would argue, for economic reasons — namely that parents perceive, perhaps correctly, that the stakes have risen in raising their children. 

This relates to what Gary Becker used to call “child quality.” A more modern phrase is “intensive parenting.”

DOEPKE: Intensity is a good word for it.

DUBNER: How do you think about that as an economist? Is that just what you’d call a personal preference? 

DOEPKE: I think it’s not a personal preference at all. This is something that I have worked on with my coauthor Fabrizio Zilibotti. What we argue is that parents are really responding to a changed environment, just like we respond as consumers to changes in incentives. A big part of that is rising inequality and rising stakes in education. Why do American parents care so much about making sure their kids do well in high school and pass the math exam? Because now college education is super important. When I was little, it wasn’t like that. You could go to university, you could go to an apprenticeship, the inequality was quite low. There was very different paths you could take and have an equally successful life as an adult.

DUBNER: So parental intensity, as you’re describing it, takes a lot of time and money and other resources. How much does parental intensity drive lower fertility? 

DOEPKE: I think it’s an important aspect. We now have some countries with ultra-low fertility rates, sometimes below one child per woman. Those are also the countries with the most intensive parenting culture. Famously, South Korea has now about 0.7 children per woman, which means each cohort is less than half the size of the previous one.

DUBNER: How much does access to and cost of childcare impact fertility rates? 

DOEPKE: It impacts it a lot. If you look at variation in fertility across high-income countries, that’s one of the closest correlations you’re going to see. There’s a lot of variation across these high-income countries in what they spend on childcare, between a half percent of G.D.P. at the lowest end to maybe three percent — so, six times more at the upper end. And this does correlate quite closely with fertility. 

DUBNER: And when you say, “what they spend,” does that mean what government spends? 

DOEPKE: What government spends, yes. 

DUBNER: But then you have a place like the U.S., where the government spends very little on childcare, and yet our fertility rate, while it has fallen quite a lot, is still higher than most of, let’s say, Western and Northern Europe, yes?

DOEPKE: The U.S. is actually a very interesting case because indeed there is very little public support for childcare. There’s also very little in terms of policy for parental leave, and things like that. One thing that also matters is social norms. Does society accept that mothers are working full-time, for example? On that dimension, the U.S. is doing very well. Everybody thinks that’s a normal way to live your life. The other thing that masks some of these issues in the past is that the U.S. used to have a very high teenage-fertility rate, and that made the overall numbers look fairly high. Now, in the last few years, the teenage fertility rate has fallen, which is probably a good thing because many of those babies were accidental pregnancies.

DUBNER: I would think another big driver of fertility choices is access to and cost of housing. What can you tell us about that? 

DOEPKE: That is something that should be examined more empirically, but certainly the data’s very suggestive of this being important. Some of the lowest-fertility places, they are also very high housing-cost places, South Korea’s one example. The city-states — Hong Kong, Singapore — have extremely low fertility rates and extremely high housing cost. 

DUBNER: What about cost of education, especially higher education? So in the U.S. we have essentially free education K through 12 but then college, generally not free. Other countries do things differently. But here if you’re deciding between, let’s say, two and three children, one child at current prices of college, four years could cost anywhere from $100,000 to $3, $4, $500,000. So what do we know about the relationship there as a driver of lower fertility? 

DOEPKE: Yes. We, again, don’t know anything definitive because we don’t have experiments. 

DUBNER: Matthias, you people need to get to work! What have you been doing this whole time? 

DOEPKE: It is difficult because these are decisions you can’t do in the lab. Many things you can do experiments on just to see how people react. With fertility it’s difficult to do. 

DUBNER: So, Matthias, the longer we talk, the more my mind gets scrambled — in a very pleasant way, I have to say — because we read headlines about falling fertility, and how horrible that is. The general economic argument is that we need more workers, we need younger people to take care of older people; we need economic growth and so on. But as you’re describing the way fertility and family formation have actually happened around the world and why, what people are responding to — to me, it sounds like a mostly good story. If most families are having fewer children because they want to invest more in those children in terms of education and dollars, they want to spend more time with their children, they want to give their children maybe more opportunities, more love perhaps, more modeling of what a life looks like — I could imagine spinning this problem around and looking at it as a potentially wonderful development in the history of civilization. Would you agree with that, or not quite? Am I being too Pollyanna-ish there? 

DOEPKE: I would completely agree with you, looking at the past. If you think about the decline from six children to two in the United States, and the same thing happening in every country that’s now rich, it has been a fantastic thing, just as you say. It was because of this rise of mass education. We were a mostly illiterate society in 1850. Now everybody goes to at least high school. Many kids go on to college and therefore have much higher earnings. It’s a good thing for the economy. It’s probably also a good thing for relationships of parents and children, spending more time together. Another aspect is what we call the demographic dividend. There’s this big change in the age structure of the population when you do this one-time change from high- to low-population growth, you get these 30, 40 years of a very large labor force because there’s still many people entering the labor force with few people to support, because there’s still a small number of old people, but also not many children anymore, because fertility has fallen. And this is a tremendous benefit. You saw that a lot in the Asian Tigers, in South Korea and Taiwan. You saw it in China until very recently because now it’s also an aging society. 

DUBNER: Okay, so that’s the good news. Let’s have the bad news. 

DOEPKE: When you think about why fertility is falling even further now, from two children to one-and-a-half per family on average, or even less, it’s not that this reflects even higher investment. It used to be in the past all about this tradeoff between having more children and educating them better or worse. Now, it’s no longer that. It’s just other factors. And so this benefit from lower fertility is no longer there. Also, now that fertility is ultra-low, there’s new downsides coming into focus, which is loss of labor force and just a shrinkage of the population, which you might be depressed about if you just care about the survival of your people, but also has different implications on different people. When population starts to shrink, it doesn’t shrink everywhere equally. The big cities are still attractive, so people will still live in New York and Chicago, I suppose. The countryside empties out first. That’s both very unequal in terms of who it affects, and essentially contributing to widening inequality in society. 

DUBNER: So what you just described makes me acknowledge that the caution and sometimes even the panic that I read in the press about falling fertility is warranted. On the other hand, when you look at population predictions over the past 100 years or so — I mean, I have a word to describe the quality of those predictions, but let me hear your word first. How good have the predictions of population generally been? 

DOEPKE: They have been terrible. 

Since past predictions have been terrible, should we stop trying to predict the future? C’mon, where’s the fun in that?

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In case you’re not old enough to remember when the world was losing its mind about overpopulation, here’s a taste:

Paul EHRLICH on The Tonight Show: The main premise is that there are 3.6 billion people in the world today, and we’re adding about 70 million a year, and that’s too many. 

That’s Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist who in 1968 co-wrote a book called The Population Bomb.

EHRLICH: It’s too many because we are getting desperately short of food, we’re very much short of other resources, and that above all, the very delicate life support systems of the planet are now severely threatened.

Ehrlich was appearing on The Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson. That’s how mainstream his argument was. His most startling prediction was that in the very next decade, the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people would die of starvation, including 65 million in the U.S. He wrote that India was doomed, and that England “will not exist in the year 2000.” Ehrlich certainly made valid points about the challenges of a growing population, but many of his predictions were spectacularly wrong. Still, scary predictions have a way of influencing behavior, and policy. In 1979, China announced its one-child policy, which lasted until 2015. Here again is the economist Matthias Doepke:

DOEPKE: I do think that the most direct implication of this fear of high population goals were population-control policies, and those for the most part I think were a complete human disaster. 

A complete human disaster because why?

DOEPKE: The one-child policy in China, one of the biggest attempts of social engineering ever attempted — it had some positive economic benefits, in terms of income per capita. But it was also such a drastic policy, with forced abortions, massive interventions in people’s most basic choices, that it’s hard to have a very positive view about. And in India, forced sterilizations were widely used. So because we had a long-term trend towards lower fertility rates that started almost 200 years ago, the forecasts were based on extrapolating from that. And so they did the right thing in saying that fertility will continue to decline along some path. What they got wrong is how quickly that was going to happen. When Asian countries entered demographic change after World War II, they did this much more rapidly than the U.S. had done previously. They were also wrong about where it was going to end up. For many years, population forecasts were based on the expectation that in the long-term, fertility would balance out at essentially two children per woman, which would keep the population constant. There was really never much of a basis for that expectation. And now we see very clearly that fertility seems to be headed much lower, which of course has a big impact on future forecast for what population is going to be. 

DUBNER: So do you blame the demographers for getting the predictions so wrong?

DOEPKE: I don’t know if it’s truly the fault of the demographers, because these things are hard to predict. You know, the economic conditions have changed.

That’s the thing about predictions, especially predictions about something as complex as global population: something is always changing, and it’s hard to factor that in. As Doepke says, the global economy has changed a lot over the past several decades, arguably both for better and worse; that’s a much longer conversation for another time. But in terms of fertility, consider one small but interesting piece of evidence from the economic literature. The conventional wisdom used to be that fertility decisions are a result of economic conditions: that boom times produced more babies, and bad times produced fewer. In other words, fertility was a lagging economic indicator, not a leading indicator. But a 2018 research paper that looked at the 2008 global financial crisis found that fertility actually started dropping in the months before the crisis hit. This suggests, if nothing else, that fertility decisions may be more of a leading indicator than was previously thought. So, economic uncertainty is something to think about. And when it comes to making predictions in a realm as complicated as fertility, with so many variables and so many incentives, there is another area of uncertainty that might surprise you, considering how long we humans have been making babies.

Diana LAIRD: It feels unjust that we know so little about how our reproductive system works, and it’s such an important part of human existence. 

That is Diana Laird.

LAIRD: I’m a professor at University of California, San Francisco, in the department of obstetrics and gynecology and in the stem-cell program. 

U.C.S.F. has been, for the past decade, the top-funded public academic institution by the N.I.H., the National Institutes of Health.

LAIRD: My lab is really interested in where our eggs come from, developmentally speaking. How that process plays out. How it affects aging. And the 39 years in humans that we have for our ovaries to actually work and make babies. 

Those 39 years refer to the average woman’s fertility window, between puberty and menopause.

LAIRD: What we don’t know outweighs what we do know. It’s, first of all, really difficult to capture those early stages. We understand very little about how the embryo knows where to go. And why, in many patients, there’s repeated failure of implantation of the embryo. Work with human embryos is not fundable by N.I.H. dollars, and actually with fertilized embryos, is illegal in many states. So that makes it very difficult to ask those fundamental scientific questions. 

If you are, let’s say, a government hoping to slow down the fertility decline, or even reverse it, you’d think it would be useful to answer those fundamental scientific questions. One question has to do with a woman’s lifetime supply of eggs. Egg cells develop in the female while she’s still a fetus. It’s believed that she starts with around seven million eggs; by the time she’s born, she’ll have one to two million eggs. From there, her supply continues to diminish. And why is that?

LAIRD: We don’t really know how these events in the early development of the embryo connect to the number of eggs that we have eventually. 

Laird likes to use an economic analogy here:

LAIRD: If I told you that you’re going to have an inheritance of $7 million, you would probably be really happy. And if I said, “Well, due to market conditions and volatility, by the time you’re born, it’s going to be more like $1 million.” You’d still probably be like, Well, $1 million is pretty good. But then if I told you that, “Well, by the time you actually need this inheritance, it’s going to be closer to maybe $3 or $400,000,” you would think I was a really bad investor. Because, you know, the eggs are our inheritance. I guess I could make it worse and I could tell you that by the time you use them, a lot of those dollars are not going to be accepted, because they won’t work. 

And there’s even more uncertainty: physicians and researchers can’t accurately measure the number of eggs in a given woman’s ovarian reserves. Nor do current tests reveal anything about the quality of an egg while it’s in a woman’s body.

LAIRD: How is it that a doctor can’t actually tell you how many eggs you have? If you’re 20, how can you start to make plans about how you’re going to live your life, how you’re going to have a career, whether or not you’re going to have children, and when that might happen — how can you make all those decisions if you don’t even know how long you have to reproduce, and if you’ll be able to? I’m not saying that everyone needs to reproduce. But I think it should be a choice. It’s a very human experience, and it’s how we continue our species. Unfortunately, the research funds for understanding the basics of reproduction and fertility have been pretty meager.

Indeed, researchers have found that N.I.H. applications with the words “fertility,” “ovary,” and “reproductive” have the lowest rates of funding acceptance — much lower than keywords like “protein” or “glaucoma” or “mRNA.”

LAIRD: It makes it a little bit less painful when I get grants rejected. It’s not just me.

In February, President Trump signed an executive order called “Expanding Access to In-Vitro Fertilization” as part of his administration’s push to boost fertility rates. But soon after, his administration eliminated the six-person team within the Department of Health and Human Services that tracks I.V.F. So if scientific research isn’t the way forward for a government that wants more babies, how about financial incentives?

Amy FROIDE: It was a decade-long experiment that really was considered unsuccessful.

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It might be tempting to think that fertility rates have only begun falling recently.

Amy FROIDE: One of the things that my work shows is that fertility rates have declined in other time periods and in other places.

That’s Amy Froide.

FROIDE: I’m a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Froide specializes in early modern Britain, women’s economic history in particular.

FROIDE: In the 1690s, England was in the midst of — really, the beginning of — over 100 years of wars against their enemies, the French. And there was a concern about being a strong and prosperous nation that could compete militarily and politically.

And that meant growing their populations. Back then, fertility rates were very closely tied to marriage rates. In many places today, that connection is much looser. But King William III of England reckoned that boosting marriage would boost fertility; enter the Marriage Duty Act of 1695.

FROIDE: They began to tax bachelors over the age of 25, and widowers who were childless. Sometimes, elite single women were taxed as well.

Froide says this new tax was likely unpopular — as taxes tend to be — but: did it work?

FROIDE: We’re not sure that we can prove that it raised marriage rates. And it also didn’t raise enough money for the king and his wars. So it was abandoned in the early 1700s.

France, meanwhile, was also concerned about their fertility rates. But rather than offer a stick in the form of a tax, they offered a carrot.

FROIDE: Louis XIV passes an edict in promotion of marriage in the 1660s, which is even a little earlier than the concern about marriage in England. In this edict, he was willing to offer financial incentives to men who would marry by the age of 21, which was very young. Also, financial incentives to men who fathered large families.

As with the marriage tax in England, it’s hard for historians like Froide to prove whether these incentives boosted fertility. What’s interesting is that, just a few decades later, both France and England started to study fertility itself.

FROIDE: Both countries become much more concerned about what we today would call reproduction. In fact, that’s an 18th-century term. Before that time, “generation” was usually the term. But there’s a more scientific conceptualization of producing children that takes hold. Along with it is an encouragement of new technologies and new people that might be able to ensure that childbirth is more safe and more successful.

In England at the time, as many as one in three babies were dying in childbirth or soon after.

FROIDE: A 33 percent infant mortality rate is horrific, right? There was a feeling that perhaps female midwives were not doing an adequate job. And over the 18th century, we see the introduction of the man midwife. The man midwife was a male who had been educated at a college or university, and who was going to bring a more scientific approach to childbirth. And so men began to push female midwives out of the business of childbirth. This starts at the apex of society, women of the nobility and royal women began to use male midwives. At the same time, they also embraced new technologies like the forceps, which are developed by the man-midwife family the Chamberlens.

Side note here: the Chamberlens family hoarded their invention for more than a century, not sharing it outside their well-bred circle. This withholding of the forceps is thought to have cost millions of lives. In France, meanwhile, the midwife industry went in a different direction.

FROIDE: Louis XV decides that he needs to train midwives better, and the person he chooses to do that is a woman. Her name was Madame du Coudray. Coudray was a Parisian midwife who received training and then was part of a regulated body of midwives. She had some of the highest earning power amongst Parisian midwives. And so the king sent her around the country to different cities and towns where she trained local female midwives in some of the up-to-date ways of delivering children that she had been taught in Paris.

Madame du Coudray promoted a different style of midwifery than the male midwives.

FROIDE: Female midwives would argue they didn’t need forceps because they could handle complicated births with their own hands. Coudray also felt that technology, instead of being used in the birthing process, should be used in the teaching process. She developed what she called her machine, or her mannequin, which was a simulated pelvis of a woman with accoutrements like a fetus and a placenta. She used different types of textiles and materials to try to simulate reality. She would have both hard and soft materials, perhaps leather, perhaps linen. Different colored materials to indicate different parts of the anatomy. It shows her understanding of anatomy, her practical nature, her inventiveness.

Coudray also published a midwife handbook with colored anatomical plates.

FROIDE: It’s hard to prove causality. But we do see in some areas that live births and successful live births were going up. There’s a wonderful book by Nina Gelbart called The King’s Midwife, where she argues that you could extrapolate the number of successful births based on Coudray’s training, and then the midwives who followed her training. That kind of thing can be hard to trace, though, for the 18th century. And one of the sad things is so many records were destroyed in the French revolutionary period.

If you go back to 18^th century England, meanwhile, it does seem like there was a fertility rebound — as evidenced by new concerns about overpopulation.

FROIDE: People began to discuss the idea of limiting population as a way to improve one’s economy. England is often taken as the example of a country that did that early, that is associated with industrialization, and the idea that perhaps not as many people are needed to work in the economy. And so it’s interesting to me, as a historian, to see us returning to concerns about having enough workers.

This is really an eternal question how many people should be allowed, or encouraged, to exist in a given space and place? This question can quickly migrate into the political sphere — and from there, it’s a short step to government policy. Our era is not immune. This recent concern about too few babies — it can feel like whiplash after all those decades of concern about overpopulation. And of course before that were more underpopulation worries — and so on and so on and so forth. I wasn’t kidding when I called it an eternal question and it swings both ways. At the moment, governments in many countries are trying to boost their babyhood: through tax benefits, better parental leave, cash bonuses, state-sponsored matchmaking apps, and much more. Will they work? Here, again, is the economist Matthias Doepke:

DOEPKE: These are the biggest decisions we take in our lives, and you see in the data that people don’t respond very strongly to short-run changes in policy. Financial incentives, if you just give a bonus for having more children, you know people do respond, they don’t respond very much. They are in many ways set in their ways and you make a plan and you will not change it — like, government by government.

DUBNER: If you were Secretary of Higher Fertility in Washington in a future time, what would be your best ideas society-wide, and not just perhaps around the time of birth, but what would be your biggest society-, economy-wide ideas for providing the best situation to boost fertility?

DOEPKE: I think we’d want to imagine what kind of society will want people to have larger families, and what are the things holding them back right now? We have mentioned many of them. One is this issue of compatibility of careers and having children. That has to do with making it easier for women to rejoin the labor force after they have children. More childcare provision. Another part that has also come into focus with the pandemic is this issue of flexibility of jobs. If you have a job but it’s completely inflexible — meaning you have to be there 10 hours every day, you can never leave, if, for example, a child has a fever or has a theater performance — that will also make it more difficult. So creating workplaces that are a bit more flexible for everybody will also make it easier for families to decide to have that additional child.

I went back to Catherine Pakaluk, the economist-mother of 14, and author of Hannah’s Children.

PAKALUK: I don’t believe that policymakers ought to aim to influence household decision-making as regards children. The reason I say that is because those costs and benefits — the big ones, the ones that are really affecting our current situation — those are subjective and personal. Policy can’t hit those things.

DUBNER: Do you feel that that position aligns you with a particular political movement or even a name?

PAKALUK: I sometimes use the language of a pragmatic libertarian. Pragmatic in the sense that I’m not committed to the philosophical foundations of libertarianism.

DUBNER: You write, “The flourishing of traditional religious institutions breaks the low-marriage, low-fertility cycle. People will lay down their comfort, dreams, and selves for God, not for subsidies.” Can you say a little bit more about that? Because as the global fertility rate falls, we’re seeing more and more governments take all kinds of measures to try to boost births. As far as I can tell, most of these fail, or they might produce a short-term birth boom, but that seems to be just a timing thing — that it’s not actually encouraging people to have more children, just the timing. Can you talk about the ways in which, as you write it, government subsidies are weaker than internal or religious guidance?

PAKALUK: They’re weaker because they just don’t operate on the right margin. We’re proud of the fact that women and girls spend 12 years in school — minimally, we hope. But what happens in those 12 years of school is that we’re preparing for certain kinds of professional work. That’s the margin where the conflict between family and career is happening. It’s not obvious to me that subsidies of the kind that we’ve been thinking about can really get into that margin and make that adjustment. Do we have to roll back women’s education in order to see higher birth rates? I don’t think the answer is yes. I think the answer is definitely no. But we have to ask questions about value formation and where those things come from.

DUBNER: Why shouldn’t I say, “Hey, Catherine, I understand that you’re making a particular religious/personal argument for the beauty of having more children, and I’m cool with that, 100 percent cool with that. On the other hand, I don’t think we really need to be having a conversation about boosting a falling fertility rate, because the future is probably nowhere near as grim as the doomsayers say. So, should people who are worried about low fertility rate, rather than trying to come up with government policies to boost births, policies that don’t work, should we all just relax a little bit and let people do what they want to do?

PAKALUK: I’ll put it this way. I do not think of my book and my work as an attempt to promote having children. My work is an attempt to help people understand what are the costs and benefits, and how do households make these decisions. I’m attempting to show up in that conversation and say, “Look, that may be a policy decision that will have unintended, perhaps negative consequences, because I don’t think you can encourage this.” What’s a policy with fewer unintended consequences? I like to think that religious liberty is a good policy decision for countries of any type, at any point in time. Pluralism, religious tolerance, and devolving more of the human care in society to religious communities. So, in a sense, I see this as a moment to say, “Calm down, and if you want to do something, here’s something that you can do, which I think could never harm things, and could only help.”

DUBNER: I have to say, I only have two kids, but I like them so much I wish I had a couple more just like them.

PAKALUK: I get that. There’s limits, but I would certainly love to have a few more. 

That, again, was Catherine Pakaluk. Thanks to her, to Matthias Doepke, Diana Laird, Amy Froide — and thanks, especially, to you for listening. I hope you will spread the word about our show. That’s the biggest thank-you we could ask for. If you’d rather complain — you can write directly to us, at radio@freakonomics.com. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey, and mixed by Eleanor Osborne, with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Kulman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; and our composer is Luis Guerra.